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Sales KPIs: what to set for the rep, the head of sales and yourself

in short

Sales KPIs break into three levels. A rep answers for what their own hands move: conversion from enquiry to payment, first response time, enquiries with no movement, average deal size. The head of sales answers for the system: the team hitting plan, team conversion, how fast new reps reach standard, turnover. The owner looks at five numbers a week: money in the bank, conversion, enquiry flow, cost of sales, receivables. A number with no formula, no benchmark and nobody answerable for it stays an observation.

Three levels that must not be mixed

The commonest scheme looks like this: one spreadsheet with fifteen metrics, opened once a month. The rep sees numbers in it they do not move. The owner sees numbers they take no decisions on. A quarter later the spreadsheet stops being opened.

The split is simple. To the rep — what they change by their own actions today. To the head of sales — what shows the state of the system. To the owner — what they take decisions about money and people on. A metric at any level needs three things: a formula, a benchmark, and a person answerable for it.

For the rep: five numbers, more will not hold

  • Conversion from enquiry to payment. Counted from every enquiry that reached the rep through to money in the bank. Benchmark: the team average for last quarter.
  • First response time. Minutes from the enquiry to the first message, for each enquiry separately. Benchmark: under five minutes during working hours.
  • Enquiries with no movement for more than a day. The count of open deals with no next step and date. The norm is zero.
  • Average deal size. Total payments divided by the number of payments. Benchmark: the team level; a one-and-a-half-times gap between reps means different conversations about price.
  • Personal plan attainment. Counted on money that reached the bank, cumulative from the start of the month.

A sixth metric only gets added by replacing one of these five. Checking the set is easy: ask a rep to name their numbers for yesterday off the top of their head. Whatever they did not name does not exist in their work.

The five minutes come from a measurement. James Oldroyd of the Sloan School of Management (MIT), together with InsideSales.com, went through three years of data in 2007: six companies, more than 15,000 enquiries, more than 100,000 dial attempts. A call after five minutes against thirty gives a hundred times better chance of speaking to someone and a twenty-one times better chance of qualifying them. Across the first hour the chance of a conversation drops by more than ten times.

21×the difference in your chance of qualifying an enquiry: a reply in 5 minutes against 30 (MIT, InsideSales, 2007)
13% → 6%cost of sales at the crypto online school over 4 months
35%conversion from qualified enquiry to payment, EdTech Poland

For the head of sales: the numbers of the system

  • The team hitting plan. By week, cumulative from the start of the month.
  • Team conversion from enquiry to payment. Compared with the same month last year and with the previous month.
  • How fast a new rep reaches standard. How many weeks pass from their start to conversion at team level.
  • Turnover for the quarter. How many people left, and how many of those went in their first two months.
  • The share of enquiries that missed the agreed response time. The norm is zero. This is the number that shows whether the rules are working.
  • The count of conversations reviewed per week. Benchmark: at least one per rep, in writing.

Personal sales by the head of sales stay out of the assessment. A head of sales with a target of their own takes the best enquiries, shows strong personal conversion, and the whole team rests on one person — when they go on holiday, the numbers fall.

For the owner: five numbers once a week

  1. Money that reached the bank since the start of the month, as a percentage of plan.
  2. Conversion from enquiry to payment for the week.
  3. The number of enquiries — so you can see whether the flow changed.
  4. Cost of sales: every expense on the team divided by the revenue the team brought in.
  5. Receivables: issued and unpaid, with the age of the debt.

Average deal size and the deal cycle move slowly; once a month is enough for those. The main rule for the report: the same shape every week. A shape that changes hides the trend.

At the crypto online school we ran the project for four months: $200,000 of revenue, and cost of sales came down from 13% to 6%. Cost of sales is the fastest way for an owner to see whether the team is growing along with revenue. It is calculated as the sum of every expense on the team divided by the money it brought in over the same period. If the figure is above your product margin, every sale adds to the loss.

The metrics worth removing

  • Call count. It produces long conversations about nothing and dialling for the sake of the counter.
  • Proposals sent. A proposal with no conversation before it almost always goes unanswered.
  • Time in the CRM. It shows attendance. The result does not depend on it.
  • Orders booked with no payment. The money has not arrived, the bonus already has.
  • Touch count. It gets inflated in half a day, and nobody reads what was in those touches.

The selection rule is this: imagine a rep decides to inflate the metric while breaking no rules. If they can manage it in half a day, the metric does not go into the comp plan. Keeping it for reviews is fine.

How to tie money to the numbers

Money is paid for the result — payments that arrived. Action metrics are there for management: they show you why the result is missing.

  1. Base salary — for following the rules: response speed, records filled in, turning up to stand-ups.
  2. Commission — on money that reached the bank. Orders booked stay out of the base for commission.
  3. Bonus — for hitting plan, with a threshold: below the threshold the commission rate is lower.
  4. A separate bonus — for whatever you are lifting this quarter: repeat sales, average deal size, clearing receivables.

The scheme fits on one page, and a rep has to be able to work out their own pay without the head of sales and a calculator. When they cannot do it, the scheme gets simpler.

The rhythm: when to look at them

  • daily — enquiries with no answer, first response time, money for the day
  • weekly — plan against actual cumulative, conversion, one conversation reviewed per rep
  • monthly — cost of sales, average deal size, deal cycle, turnover
  • quarterly — a review of the set itself: which metrics stopped affecting decisions

The daily numbers get looked at in the morning, before the first call. If the report arrives in the evening there is nothing left to fix: the enquiries that went unanswered today have time to write to somebody else before morning.

What you should have at the end

  • every metric has a formula, written out in words
  • every metric has one person answerable for it
  • the rep has no more than five metrics
  • the owner's numbers and the rep's numbers are counted from one source
  • a benchmark stands where you have one; where you do not, your own figure from last quarter is used
  • any metric nobody took a single decision on all quarter has been dropped from the set

Questions people ask

How many KPIs should one rep have?

Three to five. More than that and a person stops holding them in their head and starts working the one that pays most. If you want to add a sixth, remove one of the existing ones first.

Can I pay commission only?

You can, when the enquiry flow is steady and the person fully controls the result. The downside is that without a base salary you have no lever on the rules: there is nothing in it for them to keep records, answer within five minutes and turn up to stand-ups.

What KPI does the head of sales get if they also sell?

A head of sales is judged on the team: plan attainment, conversion, how fast new reps reach standard, turnover. Personal sales stay out of it. Otherwise, faced with a choice between their own deal and reviewing somebody else's conversation, they will pick their deal every time.

What do I do if plan is missed two months running?

Check whether the plan is reachable on current numbers: enquiry flow times conversion times average deal size. If the arithmetic does not add up, the problem is the plan. If it does, look at each rep's conversion separately — a shortfall is almost always made up of one or two people.

Should I set a KPI on call count?

For reviews the number is useful: when conversion sags, you look at how many attempts there were. Paying for it is not worth it — the metric gets inflated in half a day and says nothing about money.

Which number should an owner look at daily?

Enquiries with no answer. It is the only figure you can fix the same day, and it turns straight into money: the count of missed enquiries times your conversion and average deal size.

Where do I take benchmarks from if there are no industry figures?

From your own history. Take your figure from last quarter and set the benchmark slightly above it. Market averages rarely match your deal cycle, your deal size and your enquiry channels, which makes steering by them risky.

Sources: our own measurements on 2026 projects and published Double Sales cases (the crypto online school, EdTech Poland); the Lead Response Management study — James Oldroyd, MIT Sloan School of Management together with InsideSales.com, 2007.
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